


Five Times Erik Lehnsherr Met His Son and Didn't Realise, and The One Time He Did

by Dorkangel



Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: 5 Things, Brotherhood of Mutants, Calm Down Erik, Charles is good with children, Erik Has Feelings, Erik is a BAD father, Erik is a Father, Exactly What It Says on the Tin, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Peter Does What He Wants, Poor Erik, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Unsuprisingly, Wanda and her sanity, Xavier Institute
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-03
Updated: 2015-02-03
Packaged: 2018-03-10 09:08:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3284738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dorkangel/pseuds/Dorkangel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Exactly what it says on the tin. Ranges from after the liberation of the camps to one year after DOFP, with what I think is probably kind of semi-canon-ish.<br/>In which Peter is a thief, Erik is a terrorist, mutants and humans have a problematic relationship and Charles is, as usual, essentially a fluffy puppy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Times Erik Lehnsherr Met His Son and Didn't Realise, and The One Time He Did

Five Times Erik Lehnsherr Met His Son and Didn't Realise, and the One Time He Did.

1\. The first time, he knew that he was meeting a child - _his_ child - and that, maybe, just maybe, it was his son. There was a fifty percent chance, right?  
It was twins, Magda insisted. There was definitely more of a weight than when she had Anya.  
Anya said she didn't care, running circles around them and laughing.  
It was 1954, he was in love, he was surrounded by his family, and all the horrors of ten years ago felt like a million miles away, and so Erik (except he wasn't Erik, he had called himself Magnus for years now) decided that he didn't really care either.

But then everything fell apart. The villagers where they were living, in Vinnytsia in the Ukraine, learned about his powers. What he was, what he could do.  
And they torched his house with his daughter inside it. She was five.  
He never did know, at the time, what had happened, but he learned later that as he screamed and tore the buildings apart by their foundations, Magda and his unborn twins ran away.  
They went to Poland, but he ended up going in completely the other direction, to France, and there he found a man in a bar boasting about all that he'd done in the war- but he wasn't an allied soldier, he was a Nazi, he was one of those responsible for the utter ruination of his life and the deaths of his family and everyone that he'd grown up with-  
And, long story short, Erik ended up on a rather darker path.

 

2\. The second time Erik Lehnsherr met his son, the year was 1962 and his son was eight. He himself, at thirty one years old, was waiting for a very specific taxi in the middle of D.C., a cheerful young man in an overcoat next to him, chattering on in a distracted voice about genetics and anomalies and all kinds of complicated things that, even if the little boy spoke good enough English to comprehend, he had absolutely no chance of understanding.  
Erik leant back on his heels, gazing about the cityscape with boredom, and almost missed the angry little kid who sped past him, about hip height. He had better reactions than that, though, after years of surviving the most violent, wretched situations, running around Europe, and killing very desperate men, and he twisted and reached out to grab the boy by the back of the polo shirt he was wearing about two seconds before the kid ran into the path of an incoming car.  
Next to him, his friend Charles cried out 'Erik!' at precisely the same time as the kid shouted in surprise and the pain of being jerked backwards.  
"Let go'o me!" he yelled, his voice vaguely accented and trembling with what Erik suddenly realised was him crying.  
"Do you want to get run over?" he demanded, getting a closer look at the kid. He had brown hair, just a little too long, and eyes so dark they seemed almost black. Right now his little face was red and angry and screwed up, and the strap of the school bag he was wearing had gotten tangled around his small body.  
"...no." grumbled the kid reluctantly, looking away from Erik's cold and frightening eyes.  
"Good." grunted Erik, letting him go, and the kid settled next to them to wait for a green light to cross.  
"Sorry about him," continued Charles gently, bending down so that their faces were on the same level. "Erik's not so good with people. Can you tell me your name?"  
Erik snorted - Charles could have read it out of the boy's mind, and probably did minutes ago - but apparently it did something comforting, because he sniffled and rubbed his nose before replying.  
"M'Pietro."  
"I'm Charles, nice to meet you. What's wrong?"  
The kid surveyed him for a moment, unsure of whether to trust him, and then shrugged shyly. "They were making fun of my name and the way I talk."  
Erik glanced at Charles, a silent question in his eyes and his mind, and a received a mental _Polish_ in reply.  
" _You are from Poland_?" he asked, voice sharp. " _Your parents_?"  
The kid, Pietro, startled, and then beamed at him. "Hey, yeah! Just my mom an' my sister, though, and they talk better than me."  
Erik shrugged. "You'll learn. I did."  
The light changed and (without replying), Pietro was running across the road and down the street.  
"He's a mutant." hummed Charles, under his breath, and Erik's eyebrow arched.  
"Really?"  
"Yep. No powers, as of yet, but he's got the potential."  
"Charles, that's the cab!"  
"What? Oh, right, yes. His name is Armando Muñoz, don't-"  
They climbed into the taxi and set off, and apart from a brief thought, wondering at the random distribution of the X Gene - an Irish teenager in Boston, an English professor in New York, a Polish little boy in Washington D.C. - forgot about him.

3\. After the first couple of years in prison, Erik had gotten the trick of meditating absolutely perfect, as well as developing a technique that allowed him to sleep for about fifteen hours a day. He'd had a wooden chess set at first, but there was a very small metal screw in the top left hand corner, and four guards had died.  
So. No chess set.  
He was meditating when he met his son for the third time, and the first thought he had when he snapped out of it was _they're hiring them awfully young, considering I'm a dangerous terrorist. And if he really thinks that 'Mind the glass' is funny, my opinion of humanity just nosedived. Again_.  
But then the kid put his hands on the screen, grinning, and suddenly the same glass that had been so unfunny a second ago was raining down around him.  
Erik didn't let the almost hysterical, triumphant glee he felt show on his face and pulled himself up with one of the supports, taking a moment to survey his rescuer. The boy was in his late teens, tall, with longish silver hair that he had been wearing under a guard's hat a moment ago and was now brushing his shoulders as he shifted restlessly from one foot to the other.  
Erik didn't recognise him, but that didn't mean anything. Emma had been recruiting, before- before she disappeared. Emma was missing, presumed dead, Azazel was dead, Angel was dead, that ridiculous Sean kid was dead, Janos had run off to hide. The only person left was Mystique.  
"In two minutes, twenty guards are going to come around that corner to shoot us." he pointed out, and received a brief glance over the kid's shoulder, in constant movement as it was.  
"I know." he replied, speaking far too quickly. "That's what I'm counting on."  
He blurred into movement, and in literally less time than it took Erik to blink, was standing with his hand braced around the back of the older man's head.  
So, his ability was speed. Fascinating. (He said none of this out loud).  
"What are you doing?"  
"I'm holding your neck so you don't get whiplash."  
That was confusing. "What?"  
The kid looked at him like he was stupid, dark eyes all lit up like he was enjoying himself far too much.  
"Whip- _laaaaaaash_."  
And then the guards came around the corner, and the entire world snapped out of shape, blurring into just colours and the sound of air rushing past his body, and when it went back to normal he was standing in a elevator, reeling. By the time he managed to drag himself upright, the kid was dressed in completely different clothes - goggles and a silver jacket, jeans and a t-shirt - and was bouncing on the balls of his feet again, impatient - and, holy shit, was there a man taped to the wall? - as the elevator began to move.  
"So," started the young mutant again, curiously. "You must have done something pretty bad to end up in here."  
He rolled his eyes and tried to squash the nausea rising in his stomach.  
"What did you do, man? How'd you get here? C'mon, what'd you-"  
This was going to be a long elevator ride.

 

4\. After the... incident... with the president (and, yay, he could now boast being responsible for four international incidents - Cuba, Kennedy, Paris and the White House) his foremost concern was rebuilding the Brotherhood.  
Unsurprisingly, it didn't take long.  
He was approached by several Vietnam veterans, a few runaways, and a handful of actual dangerous mutants with powers ranging from incendiary to manipulative, but more and more be found his thoughts turning to the boy who had helped him escape from the Pentagon. Peter - was that his name? - was an incredibly powerful young man, and he clearly didn't have a problem with seriously illegal activity.  
They eventually tracked him down, hanging around the outside of a convenience store and rifling through a bright pink purse that very clearly wasn't his, quite near to where Erik was being held. Erik didn't usually believe in coincidences, but this was just a stroke of luck.  
And so he met his son for the fourth time, leaning on the grubby wall of a corner shop.  
"Using your powers for petty theft?" he asked, voice dry, and received a short laugh from the kid that sort of reminded him of himself. Erik wasn't actually stupid enough to wear a cape and helmet to go incognito, contrary to popular belief, and so he was wearing a shirt, sunglasses and hat. Peter was just back in his leather jacket and jeans, this time with a Rolling Stones t-shirt.  
"Still using your powers for murder and mayhem?" he retorted, tossing a self-help book from the purse over his shoulder, and finally glancing up at Erik with wary caution. "Not going to lie to you, I regret letting you out. No offence."  
The older man shrugged. "Thank you anyway."  
"Yeah, whatever. And this isn't pointless theft, by the way."  
"Oh, really?"  
"Yup. Woman in the store was bitching about 'Mutie kids with weird hair', 'cos, you know, and also my little sister's got green hair. So," he continued casually, fanning out about five little plastic rectangles as though they were playing cards and not credit cards. "I stole her purse."  
He threw the credit cards away and whizzed off somewhere, returning without the purse a second later and leaning against the wall again. "What do you even want?"  
"I could use someone with your skills." replied Erik slowly, not wanting the kid to panic and bolt. "My organisation is a little lacking in members at the moment."  
"Are you joking?" Peter was staring at him like he was insane now. Not the innocent kind of insane, either. "I'm- I'm not a terrorist! Or a murderer, or... I mean, I'm not a killer, man, I'm a kid. I might occasionally steal stuff or break into stuff, but it's not like I want to _hurt_ people- Jesus, did I hurt anyone at the Pentagon? I wasn't paying attention!"  
"Calm down!"  
"Huh? What, no, shut up. You killed the president, and then you tried to kill another president! You have got, like, no right to offer any kind of advice to me. Ever!"  
His hands came up to rake through his hair, ignoring as Erik glanced hastily around to make sure no one was listening.  
"I mean, I flunked high school and all, and Mom keeps going on about me needing an actual job that isn't just stealing stuff, but-"  
"You mentioned your mother," blurted out Erik, as a random device to try and stop the flow of inane babble from Peter. "At the Pentagon. You said she met a man who could control metal."  
 _You know, my mom once knew a guy who could do that._  
"What? Oh." The change of subject seemed to calm the teenager down a little. "Sorry, man, it's a different 'mom'. At the Pentagon I meant it as in, like, 'Birthgiver'. I was just talking about my foster mom. Angie- she's alright. Surprisingly good with the whole 'mutant' thing."  
Erik's expression must have given something of his confusion away, because the kid forced a laughed.  
"Don't worry about it. She died when I was nine; cancer. Someone messed up, 'cos we weren't technically American citizens at the time, and me and my twin got put with different families. She's in a mental institute right now."  
Well, shit. Was there a universal law that all mutants had to be fucked over?  
"My mother died when I was thirteen." replied Erik, and the kid shook his head.  
"And you deal with it by trying to kill Nixon on live TV. That is not closure, man."  
There was a whoosh of air and a sound like 'fwip', and the kid was gone.

 

5\. Erik tried to avoid clashing with Charles and his students. In fact, he fully supported the idea of a school and thought that, if not for Charles's ideology, he would work with them.  
The thing was that they did have a difference in ideologies, though, and that inevitably led to a few clashes, although he'd never had to attack the school itself before. One of Charles's 'X-Men' had stolen some very valuable files from him (which he, in turn, had stolen from SHIELD) and they needed to get it back _somehow_ , so, it was 1974 and he was striding through the long corridors of the mansion, ignoring the screaming from the frightened kids and whatever skirmishes were ranging behind him.  
There; the files were in a cabinet in one of the teacher's offices, and he took one step towards them and-  
And he was tackled by a flying streak of grey and silver that threw him literally out of the window. In the mess of movement that he was, though, Erik managed to sense some metal and pulled whoever had thrown him with him, and they fell out of the third floor together to land in a tangled heap of limbs.  
He wasn't stupid enough to relinquish his hold of the metal, and lifted whoever had been dumb enough to attack him into the air. The metal in his clothes was hard to keep track of, though, and it was in constant motion so...  
He stood up with as much dignity as he could muster, arms crossed over his chest as he watched the silver-haired mutant struggle in the night air.  
"Peter."  
"Hey, man." The young man's tone was full of bravado, but his face was pale and he looked scared. "Didn't except to _run into_ you, here? Heh?"  
Erik resisted the urge to roll his eyes. "So, you'd agree to go with Ch- Professor X, but not with me?"  
"Um, yeah, 'cos you kill people. You gonna kill me?"  
There was something genuinely nervous in his tone, and Erik just dropped unceremoniously onto the ground, ignoring Peter's loud cry of surprise.  
 _We have the file_ , whispered the voice of a telepath in his mind.  
"No. Run along, now."  
As usual, Peter was gone in the blink of an eye without apology or excuse.

 

+1.  
 _'Name: Wanda Maximoff_  
 _Born: 1954_  
 _Diagnosis: ~~Schizophrenia, psychosis~~ MUTANT_  
 _Notes: ~~Patient claims to be able to levitate objects and change people's fate. She says she is able to do this by manipulating the fabric of reality~~. MUTANT_  
 _Treatment: ~~Recommended repeated therapy~~ RELEASE, BLOODY RELEASE HER ALREADY BEFORE THE NEWS CATCHES HOLD OF THIS_  
 _Release date: ~~12th of Never~~ 3rd December 1974'_  
Erik scowled at the medical record, one of those that had been in the stolen files. The first version of this had been vague - the girl in question could have been a mutant, but she just as easily could have genuine mental issues that mirrored the symptoms of a mutant - but the corrected version, what with the word 'mutant' plastered all over it, was obvious. He had thought about breaking her out, but she was being released only about a week after he saw the files.  
He had been angry enough before he checked the list of contacts.  
 _'Family:_  
 _-Twin Brother: ~~Pietro~~ Peter Maximoff, age 20, M_  
 _-Half Sister: Lorna Dane, age 8, M_  
 _-Mother: Magda Maximoff, (deceased), H_  
 _-Father: Magnus Maximoff, (deceased), M'_  
The 'M's and 'H's must have stood for 'Mutant' and 'Human', considering the fact that they were in big red letters and newly added.  
But, 'Magnus Maximoff'.  
That was him. Magda was pregnant with twins in 1954, and that was when Wanda and her brother were born. ~~Pietro~~ Peter. His son. His daughter.  
But yet, they weren't. He had never been there for them while they were growing up, and he had left the name of Magnus Maximoff behind. He had no right to be their father.

He turned up to the hospital anyway, on the day that she was being released, and stayed in the shadows. A few minutes after he arrived, a car that he recognised as one of those belonging to Charles turned up, being driven at breakneck speeds, and before it had even finished its jerky parking job, Peter had zoomed out of it and was walking towards the door with a little girl in a pink princess dress in his arms. She had bright green hair.

He was twitching anxiously as he walked, at about a hundred times the normal speed, and she tapped his arm to look him very seriously in the eyes. "Peter. Calm down."

"Right, yeah, sorry, it's just Wanda'soursisterandIhaven'tseenherinliketenyearsjesusI'manawfulbrother-"

"Calm down."

"...ok."

A young woman with thick, curly, red/brown hair and slightly haunted dark eyes emerged from the door hesitantly, a small suitcase being pulled behind her, and Peter put the girl down quickly on the ground to run over to her (at normal speed), his total anxiety showing in his face. She looked at him, and then back to the bored-looking male nurse who was standing at the door in confusion.

"Wanda?" he asked, accidentally cutting her off before she could say anything. "Are- I mean, do you-

"Pietro?" she replied, her voice unsteady. "Your hair's different."

He choked in an attempt at a laugh. "Yeah, it... It grew that way."

She nodded, biting her lip, and suddenly she had thrown herself into his arms and he was hugging her back, and they were both crying.

"I was scared," she whispered, and he nodded so fast that his head became a blur. "We've got a safe place. Professor Xavier made a school for us to go to."

She exhaled in relief and hugged him tighter, and Erik turned around to leave.

Maybe it was better for his son, and his daughter, to be at the school instead of the Brotherhood. At least with Charles they'd be safe.


End file.
